This article introduces the concepts of play and playfulness within the context of legal-philosophical education. I argue that integrating play and playfulness in legal education engages students and prepares them for dealing with the perpetual uncertainty of late modernity that they will face as future legal professionals. This article therefore aims to outline the first contours of a useful concept of play and playfulness in legal education. Drawing on the work of leading play-theorists Huizinga, Caillois, Lieberman and Csikszentmihalyi, play within legal education can be described as a (1) partly voluntary activity that (2) enables achievement of learning goals, (3) is consciously separate from everyday life by rules and/or make believe, (4) has its own boundaries in time and space, (5) entails possibility, tension and uncertainty and (6) promotes the formation of social grouping. Playfulness is a lighthearted state of mind associated with curiosity, creativity, spontaneity and humor. Being playful also entails being able to cope with uncertainty. The integration of these concepts of play and playfulness in courses on jurisprudence will be illustrated by the detailed description of three play and playful activities integrated in the course ‘Introduction to Legal Philosophy’ at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Jurisprudence is a domain related to terms such as rules, morality, principles, equality, justice, etc. Legal scholars have to teach the meaning of these terms. However, these are not terms, one can comprehend by just reading their standard definition. These are terms one must digest and learn to use. My argument is that literature or the law and literature movement can be used as a tool in order to explain and discuss these terms. For instance, beyond simply explaining or teaching legal positivism and natural law, Antigone helps students reflect upon the distinction between them. To cite another example, reading Nana can help students think about sex-workers in a way they would never think before. Moreover, the literature can be a useful means in teaching critical movements in law, such as critical legal studies, feminist legal theory and critical race theory. Finally, the terms I stated at the beginning are not only terms of jurisprudence, they are terms we should use properly in order to construct a healthy legal environment. Therefore, to get students comprehend these terms is a crucially important aim. I argue that literature can be a tool in order to achieve this aim.

This paper presents a basic model of the imagination and offers pedagogical resources and activities for educating three related abilities to imagine. The basic model is that to imagine is to combine the process of awareness, framing and distancing, and the process of, simultaneously actively participate, by doing things with and thanks to artefacts. Artefacts, in turn, are fabricated forms (here, forms of language) that signal their own artifice and invite us to do things with them, across a spectrum of sensory, kinetic, and affective abilities. Modelled in this way, imagination plays a crucial role in legal reasoning, and is exemplified by the following kinds of artefacts in legal discourse: fictions, metaphors, hypothetical scenarios and figuration. These artefacts and their related processes of imagination are vital to legal reasoning at many levels, including the level of the individual lawyer or judge, the level of interaction in courtrooms, and the level of legal language over time. The paper offers nine learning activities corresponding to educating three abilities in the legal context: 1) to take epistemic distance and participate; 2) to generate alternatives and possibilities; and 3) to construct mental imagery.

Different legal rules can lead to the same observable outcome, making it difficult to identify the most influential rule. This article addresses this gap by focusing on how competing explanatory theories derived from a doctrinal analysis can be assessed using a methodology called process-tracing. One of process-tracing’s main uses is to link explanatory theories to empirical evidence, permitting an assessment of causal mechanisms’ practical impact in comparison to each other. This article demonstrates the potential and practical implementation of process-tracing in the context of empirical legal research. In addition to the core characteristics of process-tracing, the paper clarifies when process-tracing can add to a doctrinal analysis and the requirements which have to be met. Furthermore, the process of linking doctrinal work with empirical evidence relying on process-tracing is shown, using the example of copyright ownership in the broadcasting sector. As a result, this paper demonstrates the added value of a process-tracing analysis carried out in addition to doctrinal work, in particular the insights into industry practice it generates.

This paper starts by reviewing empirical research that threatens law and economics’ initial success. This research has demonstrated that the functioning of the law cannot be well understood based on the assumption of the rational actor and that policies which are based on this assumption are likely to be flawed. Subsequently, three responses to this criticism are discussed. Whereas the first response denounces this criticism by maintaining that the limitations attributed to the rational actor can easily be incorporated in rational choice theory, the second response welcomes the criticism as an opportunity to come up with an integrative theory of law and behavior. The third response also takes the criticism seriously but replaces the aspiration to come up with such an integrative theory by a context-sensitive approach. It will be argued that the first two responses fall short while the third response offers a promising way to go forward.

Legal doctrinal scholarship engages with the problems of legal practice: it systematizes, comments on, evaluates and debates what goes on in law. These activities do not occur in a vacuum: they are embedded in scholarly traditions and theories. This paper discusses the role of the theoretical frameworks used in legal research and has two related aims. First, it aims to provide some practical conceptualizations and guidelines regarding theoretical and normative frameworks that are useful to understand and conduct legal research. Second, it aims to investigate the relationships between different kinds of normative frameworks and their relationship to empirical work. In the second part, an argument is made for a pragmatist understanding of the interplay between normative theorizing and empirical study. How do these work together in judgments about the state of the law?